Anyway, I met Jason's and Shay's friends, and we ate. Shay made beef, sausages, asparagus, and artichokes. I didn't know how to eat an artichoke, and decided I didn't want to embrace Davisian culture quite that much, but the rest of the food was quite excellent, especially the asparagus. The Oscars came on, and the graduate students organized themselves around the television, drinking and laughing and chatting. Jason and I retired to his woodshop, where I set up my video camera and interviewed him.

I did a horrible job. It occurred to me several times during the interview that I wanted to catch him from a different angle, or a different level of zoom. For some idiotic reason, it didn't occur to me that I needed to wait until he wasn't speaking to adjust my shots. So several minutes of the footage will be unusable, as he's busily answering a question, and suddenly, with herky-jerky movements, his face gets rapidly bigger or smaller. I am such an idiot.

The lighting in his woodshop was great, though. It was brighter on one side than the other, and really brought out his incredible tan. Maybe at some point we'll put a little of this footage on the web, or we might not, screw you all.

I told Jason my tripod sucked, so we pulled out his; a massive, heavy thing he uses to take VHS recordings of salmon mating. It was most exciting, setting my 3-pound camera on a 50-pound tripod.

So like I say, Jason admires Bukowski a great deal. He's in his early thirties, and I think he's a little older than the other grad students who were there that night. I dunno. I don't even remember if he really told me he was in his early thirties, or if I hallucinated that. I have a cold now. I've given my host a cold, and he's in bed, unable to take me to Haight-Ashbury. I feel fine, but that's because I'm happy to be in San Francisco. I'm in San Francisco right now, by the way. But none of this has anything to do with Jason.

Jason is extremely self-depreciating. He writes his poetry because he feels something, he writes it quickly, and that's the end of it. He doesn't revise. He says he appreciates the artistic merit of revision, but that's not why he writes poetry. He doesn't want to create the perfect poem, he just wants to express something and be done with it. That's why he's a poet instead of a fiction writer: he wants to express things quickly and never deal with his work again. He doesn't like his poems. He just needs to write them.

While he was telling me all this, Shay came in and asked how it was going. He told her to go away.

So I ask him, why do you seek publication, if you care so little for your work? He says that when a poem is published, it feels truly final to him: that by seeking publication, he is putting an end to the feelings that inspired him to write the poem in the first place.

So the interview continued; I asked him about his woodshop, and he told me about that. I asked him about his garden and chickens, and he said that that was mostly a Shay thing. We wrapped it up and watched a few minutes of the Oscars. I felt comfortable in drinking more. Eventually, Jeff Breen showed up to take me to my next stop.